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'Lawrence of Arabia' leads this compelling history

By Matt Damsker Anyone who has seen David Lean's classic film, Lawrence of Arabia, may be forgiven for not quite grasping what the British and Ottoman Turk empires were up to in the Middle East during World

'Lawrence of Arabia' leads this compelling history

Anyone who has seen David Lean's classic film Lawrence of Arabia may be forgiven for not quite grasping what the British and Ottoman Turk empires were up to in the Middle East during World War I.

Oh, the complexities: Turkey's alliance with Germany, the imperial arrogance of Great Britain and France, the plight of the Arab tribes and native populations of the region. This was a geopolitical muddle of epic, often tragic, proportions. Amazingly, Lean captured its outline in his 1962 masterpiece.

But no four-hour movie can do real justice to the bureaucratic fumblings, the myriad spies, heroes and villains, the dense fugue of humanity at its best and worst operating in the Mideast war theater of 1914-17.

Thrillingly, Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia (**** stars out of four) does exactly that, weaving enormous detail into its 500-plus pages with a propulsive narrative thread.

Yes, Anderson has a stupendous protagonist in Thomas Edward Lawrence, the enigmatic legend who, at 5-foot-5, wasn't tall enough to qualify for military service. Yet it was T.E. Lawrence who nursed the 1916 Arab revolt against the Turks, courting treason and defying his British superiors along the way.

If he was egomaniacal, he was equally honorable, refusing to abet Britain and France's plan to betray the Arab tribes once they had defeated Turkey. And it was Lawrence who commanded the daring raid on the Arabian port of Aqaba, attacking not from the sea but from inland, across the harsh desert of the Hejaz. In doing so, his motley army of Arab tribal fighters — led by the austere Bedouin prince, Faisal Hussein, and the fierce champion of the Howeitat tribe, Auda Abu Tayi — effectively ended Turkey's domination of Syria and Arabia, setting the stage for the modern Middle East.

"How," Anderson asks, "did a painfully shy Oxford archaeologist without a single day of military training become the battlefield commander of a foreign revolutionary army, the political master strategist who foretold so many of the Middle Eastern calamities to come?"

Drawing heavily from Lawrence's famous account, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Anderson locates the living Lawrence — a poet, an ascetic who could endure great pain and deprivation, an iconoclast who rejected knighthood and died on a motorcycle at age 46. Yet his shocking lack of familial empathy (as when informed by his mother of his brothers' deaths in the war) suggests some level of personality disorder.

Anderson's account surrounds this seminal anti-hero with a constellation of characters, each part of a mosaic of influence that colors our world today. Jewish agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn and his sister, Sarah, not only led an anti-Ottoman spy ring, they encouraged Britain to protect the Jews of Palestine, leading to the establishment of Israel. Djemal Pasha, the mercurial governor of Ottoman Syria, made whimsical decisions almost daily and can't escape blame for the genocidal expulsion and slaughter of Armenians from Turkey's Anatolian region. And William Yale, an American, won from Pasha the vast exploration concessions for the Standard Oil Company that would yield the black fruit of the region's petrochemical dominance after the war.

But inevitably, it is Lawrence, the central adventurer, who astonishes us — with his vision, his tirelessness, his capacity for gathering and acting on intelligence. Lawrence saw the future and was chillingly prescient about his Arabia, especially in his assessment of Abdul Aziz ibn-Saud, who would conquer much of the Arabian peninsula in 1923, naming it Saudi Arabia.

Lawrence warned that ibn-Saud and his Islamic fundamentalists, the Wahhabists, were not representative of Islam so much as medieval fanatics. For the next 90 years, writes Anderson, the Saudi royal family would survive by "buying off the doctrinaire Wahhabists who had brought them to power … so long as their disciples directed their jihadist efforts abroad. The most famous product of this arrangement was to be a man named Osama bin Laden."